What would you say?

Here’s a fairly funny comic. What’s going on grammatically here?

Shoe, March 2012

I suppose if you have to explain a joke, it’s not as funny, but the actual humor, I think, is a play on the stereotype of women being concerned about looking fat, and men’s defensiveness about it. But what about the grammar?

The waitress’ intent is to ask a question with a metaphorical verb (“say” meaning “have the opinion”) and a predicate adjective. This is easier to see if we put in the relative pronoun.

Would you say that I’m fat?

Even that invites a defensive reply about whether Loon would take the verb literally and would he  say anything, “No, I wouldn’t even bring the subject up.”

(Here’s a lesson in expository writing: say exactly what you mean. She really is asking, “Do you think that I’m fat?”)

Loon’s defense, though, is to interpret the question as the imperative of “to say” and as containing an object phrase, hence his reply.

I remember two other jokes that rely on similar misinterpretations.

A guy walks into a soda fountain being tended by a jini. He says, “Make me a chocolate malt.” The jini goes “Alakazam! You are a chocolate malt!” Object  and predicate nominative  ambiguity.

And in grade school back in the fifties this joke ran around. You tell an unsuspecting kid, “Say ‘black eyes’ backwards.”  The thoughtless response of “Ise black” would stimulate gales of laughter. Kids quickly caught on, though, and soon the reply was, “Black eyes backwards.” and they’d make their own laughter.

I’ll let you analyze that last one yourself.

Postscript: It’s about a month after I posted this. Today I ran into a comic that uses this same grammatical misunderstanding. It’s from the Luann comic strip for Dec 22, 2007. Luann is one of few strips that make me regularly laugh out loud.

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Today is my youngest’s birthday. So here’s an easy post for me.

How many mistakes can you spot? I’m speaking of the guy on the left, of course. I count eight, if you allow the ellipsis of the subject in the next-to-last cell. The cartoonist could have made the comic “better” if he had used “whats” in the third cell, “worst” in the next-to-last cell, and “error’s” in the last cell.

I found this comic back in Feb of 2013. The art is terrible, but the humor tends to be nicely intellectual.

The usual grammarian complaint about using “like” is that people confuse the word with “as.”

I’m going to make different complaint about using “like.” People shouldn’t say “I’d like to…” when they should actually say what they want to do.

I’d like to thank you so much for the wonderful birthday present.

I’d like to offer my condolences.

I’d like to congratulate the whole team for the completion of this project under budget and before deadline.

Bleh. Just say it!

Thank you so much for the wonderful birthday present!

Please accept my condolences.

Congratulations, team, for completing this project under budget and before deadline!

See how much more intimate and more direct it is to say what you mean?  So don’t say you’d like to do something unless you’re actually prevented from doing it, as in “I’d like to pull you out of the quicksand, but I can’t reach you.” Or something like this:

The last post touched on word order. Here’s a subtle rule in English about the order of adjectives when you use more than one to modify a noun. For example, this sounds wrong:

She gave him a golden old big star.

Somehow you know it should be:

She gave him a big old golden star.

Instead of color, age, size, it needs to be size, age, color.

Other languages do this sort of thing. German has the rule, “time before place.” French has a rather complicated set of rules for pronoun word order. Many languages place adjectives after the noun they refer to.

I hope you never feel the need to modify a noun with nine different adjectives, but here’s the order for them. You don’t need to use them all, but the ones you use should be in this order:

Opinion, Size, Age, Temperature, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose

Maybe you can think of a comfortable sentence that uses all nine. Put it in the comments.

By the way, I though of an exception: we say the big bad wolf. But that’s an idiom.

This use of “whom” is correct. Why does it sound wrong?

Good old Dagwood. From Sept 2013

The reason is because word order is important in English. The rules of word order aren’t absolute in English, but we pretty strongly like to have the subject come right before the verb. Since we don’t use many inflections, word order steps in to tell us the function of a word. Lots of times we spell nouns and verbs exactly alike. Without word order, we can’t tell. Take “run,” for instance. is it a noun or a verb? Depends.

This dog run looks pretty clean.

Would you run to the store for me?

In front of the verb, “run” is a noun, a place for dogs to hang out. After the subject, it’s a verb, something you do.

Highly inflected languages, such as Greek, care less about word order. In fact in Greek, they have a figure of speech called “chiasmus,” which means to arrange the words in a symmetrical order by part of speech. For example: adjective, noun, adverb, verb, adverb, noun, adjective. You use the inflections to tell what goes with what. It’s pretty hard (though not utterly impossible) to do this in English.

So on to the Dagwood cartoon. “Whom” is in front of the verb “talking.” That makes it feel wrong, even though it’s right. Actually, the “to” is out of place. Literally the sentence is “Do you realize to whom you are talking?” Of course, that’s even stiffer than the original.

Ah English. Sometimes you just can’t win.